With the exponential growth of pictures on the Internet, methods of automatically analyzing or processing these pictures are becoming more and more necessary. Signs of such systems can be found through the most popular sites on the Internet, including visual search websites that can search based on visual content, face defection filters on search engines such as Google, as well as automatic image matching applications that detect copyright infringement in images and video.
Digitally-based face detection in particular is finding its way into a variety of internet applications including head tracking for video conferencing, automatically locating faces in photos on social network websites, as well as various facial visual effects.
The detection of facial features has been described in prior patent disclosures by the inventor, and as a result will not be described again here. For more information, please refer to patent application Ser. No. 11/744,668 as well as other patents by the inventor.